She carried, strung from a belt about her waist, all the keys of her bins and cupboards. You knew when she was coming by the way they jangled. She was a widow, and perfectly happy. On Sundays she attended the Methodist Chapel in the High Street, with its grave black pulpit and high-backed pews. On week-days she marshaled her sea-captains, handsome bearded men, and entertained them at her table. In spite of younger rivals, who tried to win their patronage from her by cuts in prices, she held their custom by her honest personality. I believe many of them made her offers of marriage, for she was still comely to look at; she refused them as lovers and kept them as friends. She usually dressed in black, with a gold locket containing the hair of her husband, many years dead, hung about her neck. Her hair was arranged in two rows of corkscrew curls, which reached down to her shoulders from under a prim white cap. She had a trick of making them waggle when she wished to be emphatic. She was a good deal of a gossip, was by instinct an antiquary, and had a lively sense of wit which was kept in check by a genuine piety--in short, she was a thoroughly wholesome, capable, loving woman. The type to which she belonged is now quickly vanishing--that of the more than middle-aged person who knows how to grow old usefully and graciously: a woman of the lower-middle class not chagrined by her station, who acknowledged cheerfully that she had her superiors and, demanding respect from others, gave respect ungrudgingly where it was due. She was a shop-keeper proud of her shop-keeping. That week at Ransby was a kind of tiptoe glory. My Grannie took me very seriously; she had under her roof a boy who would surely be a baronet, perhaps a lord, and maybe an earl. What had only been an expectation with us was for her a certainty. The floodgate of her reminiscence was opened wide; she swept me far out into the romantic past with her accounts of my mother’s ancestry. The Evrards were no upstart nobility; they had their roots in history. She could tell me how they returned from exile with King Charles, or how they sailed out with Raleigh to destroy the Armada. But I liked to hear best about my mother, how she rode into Ransby under her scarlet plumes, on her great gray horse, with her flower face; and how my father caught sight of her and loved her. I began to understand my father in a new way, entirely sympathetic. He was a man who had tasted the best of life at the first. There was something epic about his sorrow.